If you ever wondered whether you have what it takes to be a VC, then surf to Guy’s blog and check out his VCAT test. I especially appreciate his advice:
Venture capital is something to do at the end of your career, not the beginning. It should be your last job, not your first.
As I was conducting a post-mortem our Thanksgiving dinner experience, I realized a dash of project management goes a long way for a successful holiday dinner.
- Plan, re-plan and be flexible: Plans change with new information. The key is to stay flexible and re-plan as needed. In my case, realizing nothing really fits into my small oven after the turkey goes in required complete re-planning of the cooking schedule;
- Establish your baseline: You can plan as much as you want, but if you don’t have a baseline to build your assumptions, such as the duration required for cooking, your dishes will come out at odd times, and may not even make to your dinner table;
- Know your key metrics: Cooking the turkey to an internal temperature of 180o F ensures quality and healthy dinner for everyone;
- Test and retest: Just because the temperature reads 180o F for the turkey doesn’t mean it is done. It took us three tries to ensure the thermometer was positioned correctly.
- Tools and components: The right tools and good ingredients certainly make the experience of cooking more enjoyable, and not to mention make the results tastier.
- Resources: The right level of resources with right expertise contributes to the full cooking and dining experience. Remember the adage of “too many cooks”. With thanks to everyone who contributed and helped, our dinner dishes and all the pots/pans were completely cleaned up with plenty of time before desert. I toast to that!
Finally, success for this project is measured with the number of happy smiles and overly satisfied tummies. Happy holidays everyone!
Patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and defense publications are methods utilized to protect innovation. In your intellectual property strategy, you should utilize them effectively, and when possible, use them concurrently.
Patents can be the ‘Golden Goose’ for your firm. However, they are expensive: expensive to apply, expensive to maintain, and not to mention, they are time consuming. With all that, they don’t necessarily guarantee defensibility in the face of litigation, which is also expensive. Recently Guy Kawasaki’s blog included a discussion on “Counterpoint: Patents and Defensibility” which is compiled by three patent attorneys. The blog provides a good, broad introduction on using patents in the defense of innovation, particularly focused on the needs of start-ups. Make sure to check it out.
If patents are the cornerstones of your intellectual property strategy, you should follow a few guidelines to ensure they are also your ‘Golden Goose’ in order to get your return on your investment.
1. Determine the intellectual property protection strategy that would best support your business goals. Also establish a cross-functional (not just R&D) patent review committee that will evaluate your ideas and innovations accordingly to identify the best protection for them. Potential factors to consider when making the decision should include: benefit of patenting vs. other protection strategies, commercialization potential of the invention, business strategy alignment, as well as the economic potential from the use or licensing of technology.
2. Prior to filing your patent, determine the necessary scope for your innovation. In many cases, the claims presented the in the patent application correspond to the current application area for your innovation. Your goal should be to achieve “broad coverage” without infringing on “prior art”. If your coverage is narrow, it opens itself up for “design around”, if it is too broad it will probably be rejected due to prior art. Before filing your patent, reviewing your competitors’ products and patents should be part of your scope determination process.
3. If you have specific business goals, such as licensing of your innovation for building new revenue stream, do your homework carefully. Build your business case for licensing strategy, outline the various use cases and scenarios, map out your innovation’s value chain, understand your market and potential customers, and make sure to cover incremental variations of your core technology to prevent potential design arounds.
4. Don’t forget to analyze your technology’s life cycle and plan it into your patent strategy. Technology life cycle, which follows a simple S curve, describes the stages that a technology goes through during its lifetime: emerging, growth, maturity, and decline. With that, your intellectual property protection strategy should reflect the stage that your technology is in. As an example, be cautious on doing full blown patent investments during emerging stage, look for areas of process innovation to support your maturing technology, while searching for new markets or industries to enter to during the decline phase. Given the importance of timing with patents, your patent strategy should reflect the timing of necessary actions. Check out the Open Business Models: How to Thrive in the New Innovation Landscape
In summary, your patent strategy should be reflective of your business goals and objectives. Building an intellectual property strategy and determining the role patents play within it, and following few guidelines, such as establishing a patent review committee will help increase the chances of better returns for your investments.
Here is a post by Gordon Graham on eight definitions of innovation he collected during his research. I especially appreciated his categorization of these definitions, as each of these definitions reflect that author’s own perspective and take on innovation:
Enjoy the blog!
When it comes to product development, think of a three-legged stool: scope, schedule and resources. Quality should be the foundation that you build your business upon, not the façade that is applied at the end. Remember, “Churn, Baby, Churn” by Guy Kawasaki (Rules For Revolutionaries: The Capitalist Manifesto for Creating and Marketing New Products and Services
“… but this doesn’t mean you should stay crappy.”
But, what defines quality? At minimum, it should be defined from the eyes of the customer. I recently found the following quote on the Internet. Although this quote is very widely used, its origins are a mystery to me. I would appreciate if you let me know any pointers to its source. But, I digress…
“Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Willa A. Foster or William A. Foster
As I said before, quality should be defined from the eyes of the customer; it is about having happy, or better yet, delighted customers. It is not only about delivering to the needs and benefits of the customers, it is also about the product’s conformance to those specifications, and especially how the product handles the cases of unexpected conditions. How many times you have had an application unexpectedly disappear on you without a sign? How about if you had a question for customer service, or really needed to get in touch with customer support to fix a problem, how many hoops did you jump through to make that happen?
Thinking about quality from the perspective of the customer starting at the very beginning of your product development cycle will also result in a better product design. Yet, so frequently, quality is an afterthought, and just becomes a checklist item instead of a philosophy of the development organization. Unfortunately this can result in a very poor customer experience from their first interaction with your product or service, leaving a poor first (and lasting) impression of your company.
I recently attended the NWEN. During the speaker sessions, one of the discussion points was the three-legged stool that the VCs utilize for their funding decisions: management, market development and technology. The reality is that the technology is becoming less consequential in their decision as the cost of acquiring technologies has fallen, thanks to globalization. Think about this, IF the technology is no longer a differentiation factor, and cannot create the barrier to entry for your competitors, what would? How will you build and grow your loyal customer base, which has more choices of products and services than ever before?
Your marketing, your brand and how your customers relate to your brand are now key to your success. In its simplicity, brand is defined as a promise, reputation and idea, but brand is the sum of your customer’s experience with your product, service and your company. Creating that initial ‘Wow’ factor is about having that insight into your customer needs and wants: great first usage experience that consists of usability, functionality and its interaction with the greater ecosystem. However for loyalty to occur, you need to be consistent in everything you do. This initial ‘Wow’ factor needs to spill over into the long-term satisfaction, so that not only they purchase more products and services, but also become your word-of-mouth advocates.
Yes, the first impression is important, but it should be built on the quality foundation to deliver the lasting value. And remember, the customer needs and expectations continuously change and evolve, so stay close to your customers to continue to deliver that ‘Wow’ factor. One final note, everything matters, so ensure you are focusing on quality on every possible touch point with your customers: from initial purchase all the way through the end of life for that product. Innovate with quality!
You might have seen my blog on Lego previously. As I mentioned before, Lego is now focusing on their core business. Part of these efforts also include moving their production and distribution centers to countries with lower wages. Unfortunately, their operationalization of these plans are not well executed with the Christmas in mind, and it looks like these structural changes are impacting their ability to deliver on their key products. The spokesperson indicated that their most popular products are impacted and they are not able to fulfill the demand. If you were planning on getting some Lego’s this Christmas, mainly Duplo bricks, boxes with Lego City, Star Wars and Lego Technik sets, you should start your shopping now.
Full article is accessible at cbc.ca - Lego faces Christmas production block. Based on the article, Lego could potentially loose $127 million in lost Christmas sales…